Motherhood
On 1 June 1954, Shand Kydd married John Spencer, Viscount Althorp (later the 8th Earl Spencer) at Westminster Abbey. They had five children:
- Lady Sarah McCorquodale (19 March 1955), who married Neil Edmund McCorquodale, a nephew of Raine, Countess Spencer
- Jane Fellowes, Baroness Fellowes (11 February 1957), who married Baron Fellowes.
- The Honourable John Spencer, who died within 10 hours after his birth on 12 January 1960
- Diana, Princess of Wales (1 July 1961 – 31 August 1997), first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales
- Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer (20 May 1964), who married Victoria Lockwood, then Caroline Freud (née Hutton) (the latter formerly the wife of Matthew Freud)
The British media made comparisons between the lives of Shand Kydd and Diana because they were both inexperienced young women who were thrust into the spotlight by marriage to much older men in higher stations. Her marriage to Viscount Althorp was not a happy one and, in 1967, she left to be with Peter Shand Kydd, an heir to a wallpaper fortune whom she had met the year before. Subsequently, she was named "the other woman" in Janet Shand Kydd's divorce action against her husband.
A former official officer of Diana, Princess of Wales considered the inquest claims of a rift between Frances and the Princess to be "nonsense". This officer released letters about a strong and loving relationship that existed between Frances and her daughter. Diana had saved her mother from drowning and thought of her as her "best chum".
Read more about this topic: Frances Shand Kydd
Famous quotes containing the word motherhood:
“Combining paid employment with marriage and motherhood creates safeguards for emotional well-being. Nothing is certain in life, but generally the chances of happiness are greater if one has multiple areas of interest and involvement. To juggle is to diminish the risk of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.”
—Erica Jong (20th century)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)